At present, the application of a thin panel display becomes increasingly popular and brings tremendous convenience to our life. Besides the thin film transistor liquid crystal display (TFT-LCD) technology, an electronic paper display is considered as a new-generation panel display technology Compared with the well-developed TFT-LCD technology, the electronic paper display adopts the principle of an “electrophoresis” by injecting electrically charged black or white chemical particles and solvents between two pieces of transparent glass or plastic substrates. In the portion of a thin film that carries negative charges, the positively charged black particles are attracted to flow and show a black color. The positively charged portion attracts the negatively charged fluorocarbon flow to show a white color (such phenomenon is called “electrophoresis” phenomenon). Therefore, different potential levels supplied to different positions of pixels will display different colors to constitute an image.
The foregoing display principle has a bistable feature, because the solvents and charged particles approximately have the same weight. Even if the electric field disappears, the charged particles still can be maintained at the fixed positions for a specific long period of time until a next electric field brings up the motions of electrically charged particles to produce another image. Therefore, after a display is updated for each time, it does not need a continuous charging so that the power consumption will be very low. If it is necessary to form a gray level display, an electric field can be used to control the charged particles to flow to a certain level to show a gray. Besides, the charged particles with different colors such as a red color, a green color or a blue color can be used to achieve the color display effect. A displayer adopting the foregoing principle of electrophoresis is called an electrophoretic display (EPD). Compared with TFT-LCD, EPD has the advantages of a high contrast, and a wide viewing angle from 90 degrees to −90 degrees without requiring components such as a backlight panel, a color filter and a polarizer, and thus greatly reducing both weight and cost of the display device.
However, most traditional drive apparatuses for bistable displayers use a frame buffer structure for recording the pixel data of a previous image, and then the drive apparatus compares the pixel data of a desired displaying image with the pixel data in the frame buffer and calculates the difference of gray levels of every pixel at the previous image and the desired displaying image, and then produces a drive signal based on the difference to drive a corresponding pixel to display the desired displaying image. Although a bistable displayer using this kind of drive apparatus has a shorter response time, a more complicated circuit design of the drive apparatus and requires additional memories, yet the traditional drive apparatus is not applicable for applications that do not require a fast response time such as the applications in electronic tags.
In view of the shortcomings of the prior art, the inventor of the present invention based on years of experience in the related industry to develop a drive apparatus for a bistable displayer and method thereof to overcome the shortcomings of the prior art.